Here’s Who Should Pay for Meta Verified Subscription Plan

Your time on social media platforms was what made these platforms get big and thus earn revenue through advertising but new privacy regulations and measures by giants like Apple are hurting this revenue model. Privacy restrictions and a weak ad market are making social networks pivot to subscription plans and it’s an industry-wide trend.

Discord and Snapchat have their own paid plans with extra perks. Twitter also has their Blue subscription plan that gives you a paid verified checkmark among other benefits. Zuck also announced Meta Verified which lets you buy the same blue badge for either Facebook or Instagram.

The latter two paid plans by Twitter and Facebook have caused a lot of displeasure among their respective users. For the sake of this story, we are going to talk about Meta Verified but what is it exactly about?

The paid verification plan still lacked clarity but later on, Meta shared more details. It costs $15 per month on iOS and Android or $12 on the web. You get the blue badge, exclusive stickers, access to proactive impersonation protection with direct access to human customer support through live chat and increase reach(visibility) on comments, search and explore pages.

You have to be 18 and older as Meta requires you to have to show them your government-issued ID which matches the profile name on your Instagram or Facebook profile name and photo.

Once you get verified, you won’t be able to change any other details such as your photo, username or date of birth.

Even though Meta is testing the program in Australia and New Zealand, the company has opened the waitlist to anyone.

Meta will still keep the originally verified accounts on Instagram and Facebook. But if you’re verified, you can still apply for the subscription plan to get the other perks that Meta Verified offers.

One huge thing that surprised me is that that subscription fee is not for both – you will have to apply separately which will cost a total of $24 on the web and $29 on iOS per month.

There’s a new message displayed on verified profiles and it says:

“A verified message now means an account has been verified with a government ID, and may not be well known. A verified badge is not a symbol to show importance, authority or subject matter expertise. We don’t use the verified badge to endorse or recognize public figures or brands.”

Meta is keeping the old verification process so you can still apply to be verified without having to pay the subscription plan.

The sweet part of the deal is the increased visibility your Meta Verified account gets. And this is why upcoming content creators and influencers should give Zuck or Mosseri all their money. This means your content will be recommended to more people as Meta’s algorithms will highly rank your content so you get increased reach on search and comments and on recommendation surfaces in the Explore page and Reels(Instagram is still struggling to catch up with TikTok in the short-form vertical video format)

Also, that guaranteed blue checkmark adds credibility to your account.

This would boost the visibility of growing creators(with niche audiences) but would also mean that a regular user’s experience on Meta’s apps would get worse.

To counter this Meta clarifies that it will still surface content that they think people will enjoy despite prioritizing content posted by accounts on its subscription service. “If a creator is creating amazing content and people want to see it, it’s in our interest to get that content to as many people as possible,” said Instagram’s head Mosseri.

He continued to add that large creators won’t get a significant increase in reach and that small creators would highly benefit by getting a “leg up” with this paid plan.

Brands still trust Instagram over TikTok and Meta wants to cash in on the $16 billion influencer industry. The platforms paid blue badge subscription service for Instagram and Facebook could generate the company $1.7B in revenue and land nearly 12 million subscribers by next year.